VLC Gaining Chromecast Support on Desktop

Casting has been a major feature in many video and music apps on your phone and tablet. While iOS and Android have popularized the feature, the Cast SDK also supports desktop operating systems. You can cast YouTube videos from your browser, and it’s also available for developers to integrate into their desktop apps. This doesn’t really happen since Google has a weak grasp on the desktop. macOS users will probably use AirPlay or their phone to cast content and Windows users may use MiraCast. The Chrome Browser does allow screencasting of your desktop, but that may not be the most seamless experience.

VLC, among the most popular media players, is among the first desktop programs to support Chromecast. They have been making improvements to their Android TV app, but users may have content on a hard drive that they want to access and cast to a TV in a different room.

This is part of their 3.0 update, which has been a long time coming. You can download nightly builds of the software now, but right now doesn’t have the connection dialogs to actually connect to one. It will still take some time to go into more stable builds. Chromecast support has gone through “4/5 redesigns”, showing that adding it has not been trivial, but now they’re almost happy with its implementation so it should be coming shortly.

The Qt interface received the first renderers selection dialog. You should be able to detect your ChromeCast from this interface, and stream to it. 🙂–VLC President Jean-Baptiste Kempf

VLC continues to be a pretty popular multi-platform media player, and the development team has been working hard with updates every week, so Chromecast support should not take too much longer to arrive, especially considering how popular they are.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.